A safe site for kids

It is the first week of school holidays in Victoria at the moment and I should be lying on a beach somewhere warm or at the very least taking it easy on my couch at home watching Family Guy.
Instead I am filling in some time before 12 midnight when I meet with a group of other interested educators who are training to be mediators for SuperClubsPlus au.
SCP is a website designed especially for kids between the ages of 6 and 12. Kids can create their own home pages, participate in online forums, join webrings and email other members. To me it's very much like a kids version of a ning. A social networking site for kids.
But what makes this more effective than others? Well what is unique about this site is that whenever the site is open, it is always managed by a trained mediator. "All communication between members is filtered automatically to prevent inappropriate language and content, cyberbullying, unwanted flirting and grooming. "
All communications are also monitored by teachers and by highly-skilled, professional mediators. who supervise every email, every forum post, every image upload to ensure that it is appropriate and safe. Students are only able to join through a school so their identity is validated to ensure that there is no chance of an older person impersonating a child.
Check out what some teachers who are already using it say, http://www.superclubsplus.com.au/i/teacherssay
Tonight I'm looking forward to seeing and watching what students are doing in the UK when they are online.
Should be fun.

Arthus-the new generation of 14 Year Old?

Arthus is an amazing 14 year old student from who blogs. I came across a post about Arthus on a blog called the Infinite Thinking machine, an educational blog that is contributed to by some very emminent educational commentators.
In this post titled "A 14 year old talked Educational Technology- Steve Hargadon reflects on the type of 14 year old Arthus is and how he uses and moves in the online world. His suggestion is that Arthus is not your typical 14 year old and I probably agree with that. I'm not suggesting that other 14 year olds are not as articulate and maybe as prolific as Arthus as I can think of a few that I teach at my school but none of them, as far as I know keep a blog or contribute to the online educational debate. I stress though " as far as I know". To be perfectly honest I would have no idea what type of online presence our 14 years olds have at our school. I do know that a few of them have bebo, facebook or myspace pages but I don't know what their online monikers are and I don't have any online dialogue with them. But I digress.
What really fascinated me about this post was that in the Notes section Steve wrote about where Arthus started his online journey and even more interesting was the habits and behaviours of Arthus as he interacts on the web. Much of what is listed here is a very mature response to some of the challenges and fears that educators and educational institutions face. But what is even more interesting are the 40 odd comments that have arisen out of this post. You must check it out as Arthus participates and again represents himself very powerfully in a new and exciting world of equality- he gives as much as he gets. An example I think, of the (educational) world continuing to flatten- I'm not sure that this conversation would happen in the classroom where often unfortunately the teacher has all the power .

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